James P. McDonald Week 6 Journal

Questions

Determining what the color and shade of the spots would be on the chip when looking at the calculated ratios of the genes.

What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you?

No specific part of the assignment was especially difficult. It just took time to get through the paper and take out specific pieces of information that I analyzed to answer the assignment questions.

What (yet) do you not understand?

I don't think there was any part of this paper or the assignment that I did not understand. I don't know a lot about computer programming so I don't think I would understand how people have developed programs to interpret and simplify the massive amounts of data present on the microarray chips.

What aspect of microarrays would you like to know more about?

I would like to know how microarrays could someday be used to determine the the traits of a person or show how a person's genome could point to the potential for contracting diseases. I think this could be very interesting and useful information to have about a specific individual.

Laura Terada Week 8

The most challenging was understanding the ratio calculations and the reasoning behind it. Also matching up the ratio values with the colors and what they mean were confusing at first.

What (yet) do you not understand?

I have a good understanding on the microarray; however, I find it amazing that people can use computer programs for data analysis on such a large number of genes.

What aspect of microarrays would you like to know more about?

I would like to know more about expression profiles of specific genes and how they affect different processes. I think learning about how microarrays have been used for biomedical research would be interesting as well.

Salman Ahmad Week 8

It was easy to decide what color would show up if a gene was overexpressed. The paper was also easy to read.

What aspect of this assignment was most challenging to you?

It was hard to decide what colors to use for the rations because the scale only has three colors, and there’s a gradient.

What (yet) do you not understand?

I want to know more about how microarrays can be used in the medical field, and if they are already being used, in what way.

What aspect of microarrays would you like to know more about?

There was a part of the paper that talked about microarrays maybe being less accurate than what most people think. They were not sure if that was because of experiments being carried out differently or if there was some other factor. I would like to know if these problems have been fixed.

Paul Magnano week 8

The idea of how microarrays work, especially since we did an overview in tuesdays class.

What aspect of this assignment was most challenging to you?

The questions were difficult, mainly because it could get confusing. It was not too difficult, it just took me a lot of time to make sure I was not getting confused on some of the more involved questions like the one asking about repression or over expression resulting in repression of another gene.

What (yet) do you not understand?

Im not sure how we will model this, because it seems more complicated than the other models like the metabolism model we created.

What aspect of microarrays would you like to know more about?

I would like to know exactly how accurate microarrays are, in a quantifiable manner. For example in the microbio lab where I work we have machines that will determine the identity of an organism and give a percent confidence value such as 95%. I would like to learn if there is someway this could be applied to microarrays, so that you could better evaluate the results (example, a 95% confidence vs a 75% confidence value would greatly affect the value of the experiment).